Is Your Website Working?

Does your Website attract a steady flow of targeted traffic, build an opt-in list, supply you leads and income from sales of products and services?

If it doesn't, then you need to examine your Website content, design and structure.

In most cases, Websites are designed and built first. Then the business owners try to figure out how to attract visitors. This approach is backwards.

Before you have a single web page built or content written you should have clearly identified your strategy for attracting visitors and converting them to leads or clients. Using the web to market your product or services requires a web marketing plan.

The web has the potential to be a powerful communication tool, but your Website needs to be designed in order for you to achieve your marketing goals. These goals also have to be measurable.

A Website built and managed without a clear marketing plan is usually a waste of time and money. Many Website are nothing more than web billboards. These sites generally do not attract clients and provide little marketing benefit.

What should you measure?

The most obvious category that can be measured is the amount of traffic that your Website is generating. The key value is the number of unique visitors that come to the Website. There are other values that are important, such as page views and average length of stay.

As you measure these values over time the goal would be to have a steady increase in all of these values.

Of course, if these visitors are not doing anything when they are on your Website they are of little value.

Do you have a call to action?

Your Website should be designed in such a way that your visitors are presented with a call to action. This call to action should be obvious to the visitor. Your call to action is another element that can be measured. How many visitors perform the call to action?

The call to action can take many forms. It may be opting in to a email newsletter list, or filling out a lead form. The ideal action is the purchase of a product or service.

When a site visitor performs the call to action, you have a conversion. The number of conversions divided by the number of Website visitors is the conversion rate.

One of the goals of the Website should be to increase the conversion rate.

Testing

Once you have your measurable elements, traffic and conversions, you can test various ways to make your Website work. You can test various techniques for increasing traffic. Options here include search engine optimization of your Website, pay per click advertising, press releases and article writing.

Then you will also want to increase your conversion rates. Split testing is used to determine how various elements within the web page affect the visitor. You can change the elements on the page such as the headline or color of text and graphics, to measure the affect on the visitor.

Website Goals

You now have the understanding that your business Website should be working for you with a marketing plan. You need a call to action. You need to measure traffic and conversions, and then test to improve the results.

With these measurements in hand, you can now set goals for your Website.